Our Journey
Our journey started with a meeting with seven collectives, followed by a review of our own experience and work with a number of grant makers on participatory grantmaking. We evolved five discussion papers and engaged with several experts. We then deep dived with two collectives and evolved some self assessment tools. We realised however that our process with the collectives was not straightforward - it was not just asking them the indicators that they would like to assess themselves on. Instead, we travelled with different members of the collective in a journey of critical self reflection on a number of themes relevant to their story and its unique challenges. We then took a step back to analyse these key concepts in discussion with the group, and were collectively able to evolve informed indicators to measure change. While we created self-diagnostic tools that are relevant mainly to the collectives we worked with, we wanted to eventually create a set of universal guiding principles or a skeletal framework which any collective can use to facilitate their own indicators.
The crucial aspect we found in the process is the need to embed systematic space for Sindhanai, or critical reflection. It is a contemplative, continuous process. The layers of discussions around themes and the way each of these discussions has an interpretation of real life issues facilitates the building of a unique worldview or ideology of the collective. The collective is often not about people becoming members of the collective but about people who embrace the ideology of the collective. Therefore, for us, சிந்தனை - Sindhanai is a contemplative pedagogy that needs to be holistically embraced in all stages of a collective’s journey, and any self diagnostic tool should have this as a key guiding principle.
Meeting Collectives and Grantmakers
Collective and Grantmaker Interface
Feedback
Discussion Papers
Six discussion papers were developed on themes such as decolonising monitoring and evaluation practices and measuring collectivisation.
Deep Dive with a Collective
Self-Diagnostic Tool
Co-developed a self-diagnostic tool to capture the nuances of collectivisation.
The learnings our journey (including the deep dive) was launched as our document
‘Sindhanai as Contemplative Pedagogy: Embedding Measurement in Collectivisation’
[Sindhanai; meaning critical reflection in Tamil] and the LinkedIn page Sindhanai—a platform for knowledge co-creation and critical reflection.
Brainstorming session with grantmakers and evaluators in Bangkok, Thailand
Interactions with collectives from South Asia
Global applicability and adapting the tools to diverse contexts
From discussions, emerged the necessity to establish guiding principles that could serve as a foundation for understanding evaluating collective action
Reflection Meetings
Multiple reflection meetings highlighted the need to recognise the complexities of collectives, in how grantmakers perceive collectives.
The complexities and principles formed a handbook - presented in webinars/ in-person workshops etc. to test resonance with measuring collectivisation.